Getting to Know Our Urban Wildlife
Many questions come to mind when you hear about coyotes in New York City. Where do they live? How many are there? What do they eat? Why are they here? Should they be here? We aim to address many of these questions both in NYC and in the larger metropolitan region. Just as importantly, working with students and educators, we will work to get the word out there on what we are learning.
Where the urban wild things are
Our NYC camera trap network is huge and soon to be expanded to Nassau County. That's why we partner with a variety of organizations to get these cameras up and running every year.
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Nature is an intricate web of connections and we can't study coyotes in a vacuum. To understand coyotes, we need to look at the other wildlife that calls our region home - fox, raccoon, and skunk, etc.– of which the coyote can be a predator, competitor, and sometimes both. We use camera traps to non-invasively track these critters. These cameras are automatically triggered by the movement of warm-bodied animals allowing us to observe wildlife without ever touching or disturbing the animals (i.e. the cameras do the work for us). We are using our camera traps to understand how different species are impacted by different levels of urbanization, the size of the park they live in, and the presence of coyotes.
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"No sleep til Brooklyn": Coyote colonization of Long Island
Pups playing tug-of-war with a garbage bag. Keep your eye out for mom.
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One of the last large land masses in the U.S. without a breeding coyote population is Long Island, NY. That puts the 5 boroughs of NYC at the edge of the coyotes' growing range. We are working to document and study patterns of range expansion using camera traps. We can find out which parks have coyotes and which don't (for now), what time of day coyotes are active, and whether or not coyotes are breeding. Check out the results of our first few years of field work.
However, we will never have enough cameras to monitor all of Long Island. So that's why we turn to you, the public, as an early alert system. Have you see a coyotes in the NYC Metropolitan area? Report your sighting on our iNaturalist page. |
What coyote DNA can tell us
Ferdie, his dog scout, with a Wave Hill student. We have traditionally found scat by hiking trails. Going forward we've enlisted human's best friend to help in the search
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Cameras are great at telling us a lot of information. But photographs can't distinguish between individuals and they can't tell us whether coyotes that live in adjacent parks are the same individual, family members, or unrelated coyotes. But DNA can. Using DNA from scat (aka poop) we can tell the sex and identity of that coyote. When you've collect scat from all over NYC and it's surrounding suburbs, you can start to address questions such as: Are all coyotes in the Bronx related? Where did coyotes in NYC likely come from? Are there corridors where coyote movement across the landscape is most common? This study is just getting started. We have collected over 300 scat samples along an urban-to-rural gradient from NYC up the Hudson Valley. Stay tuned.
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The story scat can tell
AMNH students with Neil Duncan creating a reference collection of potential coyote prey
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The coyote is an omnivore (i.e., eats both meat and plant matter) and is an opportunistic feeder (i.e., eats what is most abundant at the time). But even in urban areas coyote diet generally consists of food items that you would expect to see in forests and grasslands (seeds, small mammals, deer, rabbit). However, no diet study has ever been conducted on a coyote population as urban as our NYC coyotes. We've collected over 100 scat samples from the Bronx and are slowly picking through the scat identifying every prey remain to be able to reconstruct the diet of the NYC coyote . We compare remains of claws, bones, and hair to a reference collection of known prey items to make the call. Preliminary results in the summer of 2016.
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Coyote4Science: How studying road kill coyotes can help us help coyotes
Prior to 2014, the only evidence of coyotes on the landmass of Long Island (which includes Brooklyn and Queens), came from a few photographs. But, in July of that year, a coyote was killed by a car in Queens, providing our first piece of physical evidence of the animal’s presence there. This information helps our current research on coyote movement across our city, including identifying hotspots of road mortality. If there are areas where coyotes are more likely to be hit, knowing this might lead to interventions that can ultimately reduce coyote road mortality.
This poor Queens coyote is now part of the American Museum of Natural History’s vast scientific collection, a library of life used by researchers to better understand the biological diversity of our planet. By providing a permanent home for roadkill coyotes, we are also creating a record – genetic and morphological – of New York City and Long Island’s very new coyote population. Many years from now, this library of deceased coyotes can be used by future scientists and students to understand how the coyote population has changed over time, and to answer new questions we can only imagine for now. If you think you have seen a dead coyote, please email us [email protected] with a detailed location, contact information, and a picture if possible. Do not pick it up. Handling wildlife – even roadkill – is illegal in New York State.
This poor Queens coyote is now part of the American Museum of Natural History’s vast scientific collection, a library of life used by researchers to better understand the biological diversity of our planet. By providing a permanent home for roadkill coyotes, we are also creating a record – genetic and morphological – of New York City and Long Island’s very new coyote population. Many years from now, this library of deceased coyotes can be used by future scientists and students to understand how the coyote population has changed over time, and to answer new questions we can only imagine for now. If you think you have seen a dead coyote, please email us [email protected] with a detailed location, contact information, and a picture if possible. Do not pick it up. Handling wildlife – even roadkill – is illegal in New York State.
Humans: Friend or Foe?
"They’re New Yorkers, too!," is the tagline from NYCWildlife referring to the over 600 species of animals that live in NYC . The campaign is aimed at getting human New Yorkers more familiar with urban wildlife. That leaves the question, "Just what do New Yorkers think about their Gotham coyote? "
To answer this, we are gathering information from people who live close to areas with frequent urban coyote sightings, such as Riverdale Park and Pelham Bay Park. Starting in fall of 2016, we will be conducting surveys and interviews with local residents about these animals. This research will allow us to see what humans think of these urban coyotes- if they feel threatened, if they think these animals are interesting, or if they just really don’t mind! This will help us know how people might react to a coyote if they ever come across one. Information about what humans think of wildlife helps to protect both wildlife and humans.
If you see us out in the parks, come say hi! We’d love to know what you think about your coyote neighbors!
To answer this, we are gathering information from people who live close to areas with frequent urban coyote sightings, such as Riverdale Park and Pelham Bay Park. Starting in fall of 2016, we will be conducting surveys and interviews with local residents about these animals. This research will allow us to see what humans think of these urban coyotes- if they feel threatened, if they think these animals are interesting, or if they just really don’t mind! This will help us know how people might react to a coyote if they ever come across one. Information about what humans think of wildlife helps to protect both wildlife and humans.
If you see us out in the parks, come say hi! We’d love to know what you think about your coyote neighbors!